The geography of knowledge production and the use of Web link indicators and other metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the Web presence of STI research organisations

Objectives

The project explores web-geography in terms of the accessibility of web sites and from the hyperlink structure between sites.

The objectives of this project are:

• Analyses of EU research institutions by accessibility of their web sites in search engines
• Analyses of the location of EU research institutions according to the linkage structure of their web sites
• Identify criteria of assessment of the Web visibility of EU research institutions

Description of work/methodology

The project starts with a sample of STI research web sites in the EU area (see WP 1/1 and WP 2/1). In a first part the accessibility of the sites will be analysed using search engines. In a second part the project analyses the linkage structure between web sites of European research institutes and compare that with institutional networks resulting from bibliometric indicators. In this way, we are able to see whether web-linkages are more global than traditional media and how this differs across different disciplines. Furthermore, we can see what European regions are poorly linked in the WWW and what regions are poorly cited in the Science Citation Index. In a third part the project applies the so-far developed STI Web indicators to a network of institutions and organisations in the EU research area. In particular, the web metrics developed in Workpackage 2 (WP2/1 and WP 2/2) will be used in order to evaluate the effectiveness of this web presence, and by implication the web use of the owning organisations. Attempts will then be made to generalise the results in terms of both identifying best practice and isolating regional trends, particularly when a region is under performing and could take advantage of the example of more successful areas.

The application of the metrics is expected to lead to the identification of "outliers": pages or collections of pages that do not fit the general pattern. The analyses of these outliers will be sensitive to issues of gender when able to be ascertained online (see also findings of WP 2/4).

The role of ICT use, in particular of the Web will be confronted with figure about investment, R&D expenditure, personal etc. This way "classical" STI indicators will be used as an additional information and evaluation tool.